Thursday, December 5, 2013

Smartphone Crawl Errors Added To Google Webmaster Tools

Google announced last night a new feature within Google Webmaster Tools specific for tracking crawl errors on smartphones.

There is now a new filter within the crawl errors section of Google Webmaster Tools for Smartphone errors.

Pierre Far, who is the face of Google for smartphone webmaster topics, shared onGoogle+ that what is provided in this report are the "common mistakes we see in smartphone-optimized sites." Now only do these errors hurt your "site's user experience" Pierre said they can "affect your site's ranking."

Here is a screen shot of the new filter in crawl errors within Webmaster Tools for Smartphone errors:

Not found errors and soft 404s: A page can show a "not found" message to Googlebot, either by returning an HTTP 404 status code or when the page is detected as a soft error page.

Faulty redirects: A faulty redirect is a smartphone-specific error that occurs when a desktop page redirects smartphone users to a page that is not relevant to their query. A typical example is when all pages on the desktop site redirect smartphone users to the homepage of the smartphone-optimized site.

Blocked URLs: A blocked URL is when the site's robots.txt explicitly disallows crawling by Googlebot for smartphones. Typically, such smartphone-specific robots.txt disallow directives are erroneous. You should investigate your server configuration if you see blocked URLs reported in Webmaster Tools.